Plastic bags are made from oil by product; it costs about 1.6 billion gallons of petroleum to produce 380 billion plastic bags each year according to FastCompany.com. Along with plastic bottles, plastic bags add a significant amount of waste in landfill and a big contributing factor for Global warming.

The municipalities feel a big burden in recycling these plastic bags, some of them get clogged in pipes, drains and ditches, so they want the retailers to change to a better alternative than plastic bags. The San Francisco city spends $8 million a year on bag cleanup. They have issued a ban on plastic bags for grocery stores making more than $2 million a year as well as the drug stores with more than five locations in the city to use compostable bags. The ban starts November 20th for grocery stores and next May for drug stores. The city will collect these compostable bags from households and turn them into fertilizer.

The new bags are expensive; they cost about 5 to 10 cents per piece, plastic bags costs 1 to 4 cents. The disadvantage however for the compostable bags are they need special machines to recycle them, if left in landfills it will just act like plastic bags.

Other cities like New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, are also planning to have a similar measure like San Francisco’s. But there are some retailers who are already doing it on their own, out of which Ikea’s seems to be the most effective; they charge 5 cents for every plastic bag. As a result the customers have stopped using plastic bags and instead bring their own bags.

It is just not the retailer saves money by using less plastic bags, there is another major reason says Spiers-Lopez of Ikea. In the long term it’s a good decision for the customers and for the earth. Ikea also reduced the reusable cloth totes from 99 cents to 59 cents when they started charging 5 cents for the plastic bag. Ikea said sales of totes bags went 10 times more.

It is better for us if we stop using plastic bags and use more cloth bags and totes instead. If you are still using plastic bags, try to recycle all of them instead of putting them in trash, where they will remain for 1,000 years. Do the right thing for the environment.